The Spanish pilots fearfully called their cautious approach to the Russian Su-30 “interception”
Spanish Eurofighter Typhoon fighters, which have been based at the Romanian Mihail Cogylniceanu airbase since February 1, escorted two Russian Su-30s over the Black Sea.
This was reported by the Spanish resource Lavanguardia, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Eurofighters urgently took off from a Romanian base to intercept Russian planes after NATO radars warned of unidentified objects in the southern Black Sea, the Spanish contingent's commander said.
“During a combat mission, our Eurofighters identified two Russian Su-30s that were flying without a transponder signal and were not in contact with civil air traffic control,” said the commander of the Spanish detachment, Colonel Jose Enrique Hernandez.
According to the honored pilot of the Russian Federation, a member of the Officers of Russia organization Yuri Sytnik, the Spaniards are in vain exaggerating the significance of what happened - we are talking about standard training of Russian pilots.
“All these flights take place in international waters all the time - ours fly from Crimea - they accompany them, they fly - we accompany them, these are ordinary men's games, so there is nothing scary about it, let both of them train. In order to be inconspicuous, they turn off the transponders, because if they are turned on, they begin to track us from takeoff.
Therefore, training on both sides is needed to intercept certain targets that appear on the screen radar. These are training flights, so they allegedly forgot to turn ours on - they determine the operating time of NATO locators and how quickly they will detect them. This is specifically done in order to find out the combat readiness of the units that monitor the flights of our fighters,” Sytnik said in a comment to PolitNavigator.
A military expert, captain XNUMXst rank Sergei Gorbachev, agreed with him: “In this case, it is necessary to clearly have information from our side about how all this happened, including regarding the switched off equipment. Secondly, our Western competitors, they always try to exaggerate their own achievements in defiance of the real capabilities that the Russian side has.
Flights of this kind are carried out in international airspace, so there was probably no room to talk about any kind of competitive actions to force someone to do something, an “interception” that qualifies as a military achievement. We are talking about routine flights associated with patrolling in a specific area.”
Let us remind you that six Spanish Air Force fighters have been based at the Romanian Mihail Cogylniceanu airbase since February 1 of this year as part of the NATO air patrol mission in the region. It is planned that they will stay in the country until March 31.
Spanish pilots fearfully called their cautious approach to Russian Su-30s an "interception. "